Cultural Literature

Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century, dooming American cities to ghettoization. The Federal Housing Administration continued discriminatory housing...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Building on the groundwork laid in the New York Times bestseller White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explores how a culture of niceness inadvertently promotes racism. In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explained how racism is a...

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition combines the two most important African American slave narratives into one volume. Frederick Douglass's Narrative, first published in 1845, is an enlightening and incendiary text. Born into slavery, Douglass...

The Folklore and Heritage volume of the Missouri Folklore Society Journal, edited by Gregory Hansen and Michelle Stefano, contains 23 works by 18 professionals in fields related to Heritage Studies. It grew out of a consortium held in 2017 in Jonesboro,...

A powerful illustrated history of the Great Migration and its sweeping impact on Black and American culture, from Reconstruction to the rise of hip hop. Over the course of six decades, an unprecedented wave of Black Americans left the South and spread...

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate...

"Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history - and then go out and change it." -President Barack Obama Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the...

A guide to conflict resolution, or as the author prefers, "conflict transformation" that emphasizes the importance of building relationships and social structures through a radical respect for human rights and life. This clearly articulated statement...

"Destined to become one of the classics of the genre" (Newsweek), the riveting, unforgettable story of a girl whose indomitable spirit is tested by homelessness, poverty, and racism in an unequal America--from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea...

The unflinching nineteenth-century autobiography that broke the silence on the psychosexual exploitation of Black women--with an introduction by Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried and National Book Award finalist "[A] crowning achievement . . ...

As a 6'2" dreadlocked black man, Tyler Merritt knows what it feels like to be stereotyped as threatening, which can have dangerous consequences. But he also knows that proximity to people who are different from ourselves can be a cure for racism. Tyler...

The bestselling autobiography of American baseball and civil rights legend Jackie RobinsonBefore Reggie Jackson, before Hank Aaron, baseball's stars had one undeniable trait in common: they were all white. In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke that barrier,...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning...

HIP-HOP (AND OTHER THINGS) is about, as it were, rap, but also some other things. It's a smart, fun, funny, insightful book that spends the entirety of its time celebrating what has become the most dominant form of music these past two and a half decades...

The fascinating story of a friendship, a lost tradition, and an incredible discovery, revealing how enslaved men and women made encoded quilts and then used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad. In Hidden in Plain View, historian...

Two world wars, the Civil Rights movement, and a Jheri curl later, Blacks in America continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. From the antebellum practice of shaving the head in an attempt to pass as a free person to the...